The Big Heist

by Anthony M. DeStefano

  Asaro was what was known in the mob as a “brokester,” a made member who was constantly scratching around for money, a situation made worse by the fact that the old Mafia rackets just weren’t making anybody rich. People who owed him cash—it could be as little as $50—might pay him when they got around to it. Or in some cases they didn’t pay him at all. He just didn’t have the muscle to scare anybody and was bitter about all the dough he threw away gambling.

  “We did it ourselves. It’s a curse of this fucking gambling,” Asaro would complain to his cousin. In his waning years Asaro found himself living off the beneficence of friends and loans, along with whatever Social Security gave him.

  “What’s broke? I’m in so much trouble I took $2,500 from a broad,” Asaro once complained with some embarrassment. Gone were the days when he could toss around hundred dollar bills with ease and throw more away at Aqueduct Race Track.

  The morning of June 17, Valenti had arranged for Asaro to meet him at the Esquire Diner, a neighborhood place on Woodhaven Boulevard, which everybody—be they mobsters or regular folks—would go for coffee or dinner. Valenti had waited outside the diner and watched his cousin drive up in a black Mercedes shortly after 10:00 A.M. Asaro might be broke but he was able to drive a nice car, which was registered to a woman he knew. Valenti got into the passenger seat, and the car entered the parking lot of the diner. He had already hinted in an earlier telephone call to Asaro that he needed to talk with him about a problem.

  “What happened?” Asaro asked as he drove.

  “The feds are all over Liberty Avenue,” answered Valenti.

  Liberty Avenue wasn’t an exact description of where Adams and the FBI team were working. But it was very close, Liberty being right around the corner from 102nd Road where the dig site was. The avenue skirted the north border of the old Bayside Cemetery, and FBI cars and vans were all around the spot. Asaro asked for more precise information.

  “By—you know—” Valenti didn’t get to finish because Asaro mentioned the name of an old Bonanno family associate who actually happened to live near the location.

  Asaro asked why the FBI was there.

  Valenti said he didn’t know but saw all of the law-enforcement activity because he had visited his doctor who had an office there. This was a lie of course. Valenti knew very well when and why the FBI had showed up at the house because he had been secretly working with the agents for a year. He was a mob mole. A turncoat. A rat. It was because of him that the agents were at the house in the first place. They had primed him to bring up the news about the dig with Asaro. Since he was wearing a recording device, the agents hoped that Asaro would react and say something incriminating.

  Hearing about FBI activity, Asaro’s first thought was that the agents were looking to make an arrest. The Bonanno crime family had been easy pickings in recent years and arrests of family members were commonplace—never a total surprise but unpredictable in terms of timing. Since the old boss Joe Massino was picked up in January 2003 at his home on 84th Street in Howard Beach, members and associates of the family seemed to have bull’s eyes on their backs. Agents had arrested over eighty people linked to the borgata and added some Gambino crime family members, notably Charles Carneglia, another mob killer who, like Asaro, was broke and drifting in his old age.

  Asaro thought the FBI was looking for an old friend named “John” and asked Valenti if that was the case. Valenti’s response as the car drove the short distance in the parking lot would prove disconcerting.

  “I’m talking about Liberty Avenue where . . .” said Valenti. His voice trailed off as the car slowed to a stop. Asaro put the transmission into park. They were still in the diner parking lot. “You know what I mean?” Valenti continued, with a slight touch of inquisition in his voice.

  There was something in that last remark, the inflection of Valenti’s voice, that apparently made Asaro suddenly aware that maybe his cousin knew something he didn’t. Perhaps Valenti was fishing around for him to say something, something incriminating. Asaro’s mental antenna, likely tuned by his own sense of paranoia from years on the street, led him to want to end the conversation. Perhaps he was being taped. There was no good that could come from this talk. He sighed, a reaction that seemed pregnant with disbelief and disappointment. Asaro wanted to get away from his cousin. The guy sounded like he was fishing for something. It sounded like he was a rat.

  “No, I don’t know what you mean,” Asaro finally answered. Then, he told Valenti to go away.

  “All right, let me go, go ahead, go,” commanded Asaro.

  Valenti wanted to know where he should go and what should he do. Asaro didn’t want to say anything but managed to answer in one word: “Nothing.”

  Sensing Asaro’s discomfort, Valenti left the car but not before asking his cousin to keep in touch.

  “Don’t call me,” Asaro demanded of Valenti. It would be the last words he would ever say to his old lifelong friend. As later events would bear out, any sudden suspicion Asaro may have had about why Valenti was quizzing him about the FBI dig location was well placed.

  The entire meeting between the two men may have taken about four minutes, and Valenti walked away down Woodhaven Boulevard, under the watchful eyes of federal agents. At that point the agents knew that Valenti’s role as an informant was over. With his conversation with Gaspare Valenti still playing out in his mind, Vincent Asaro drove away and was spotted leaving his car and getting into the passenger side of a different vehicle on Liberty Avenue. The car drove east to the town of Inwood on Long Island where Vincent’s son Jerome had an auto-body shop.

  Vincent only stayed about ten minutes at Inwood, and it wasn’t clear what he may have said to his son. It is possible he told him about the FBI dig and Valenti’s suspicious, inquisitive behavior. He drove back to Liberty Avenue and got back into the Mercedes. Perhaps Vincent was preoccupied thinking about his earlier conversation with cousin Gaspare and the suspicion that his cousin was setting him up. In any case, Vincent was so distracted that he backed up the Mercedes—which he didn’t own—straight into a metal pillar. It wasn’t turning out to be a very good day.

  * * *

  With no money, no job, and no prospects in the gangster life he aspired to, Gaspare Valenti had come to a realization that his only way to a better existence was to volunteer to give the FBI what it wanted. The best career path for many aging wise guys, particularly in the Howard Beach area, was to become an informant. The big historic prosecutions of recent years had resulted in convictions of Massino, his underboss Sal Vitale, as well as scores of other family captains and soldiers. The once powerful borgata had become a loose group of scared mobsters who were afraid to even meet with each other at their favorite Italian restaurants, lest they violate the terms of their probation, something that the FBI routinely tried to haunt them with.

  So, in September 2008, as the newspaper headlines chronicled more indictments of the Bonanno family, Gaspare Valenti looked up the telephone number for the local New York-area FBI office and placed a call. It was that simple, although he almost was disconnected when he phoned in that first time. His first meeting with special agent Adam Mininni was on September 23 at a hotel near JFK Airport and was really just a meet-and-greet session where Mininni took a copy of Valenti’s driver’s license and some other details and then started checking into his background.

  Valenti did indeed have a criminal background, and his claims that he knew information about the Bonanno crime family and his cousin Vincent Asaro sent a quiver through the FBI. The next meeting with Valenti on September 29, saw some law-enforcement heavyweights in attendance: Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Andres, who had made many cases against the Bonanno family, notably Joseph Massino, as well as Nora Conley, the supervisor of the FBI’s Bonanno squad. To represent Valenti’s interests he had attorney Scott Fenstermaker sit in on the interviews.

  During that meeting and others that followed, Valenti acknowledged the crimes he committed and those in which
he claimed Asaro was involved. He would eventually plead guilty to crimes of robbery and racketeering in a sealed federal courtroom and then was set loose, under FBI supervision, to live a secret life as a cooperating witness. As part of his cooperation deal with the FBI, Valenti got the financial help he needed to support his family. He received a stipend. His rent was paid for, as were his utilities and medical insurance. He received over $178,000 in living expenses from the government. When necessary, security details were provided. It was a comfortable deal and was what a lot of turncoats got when they decided to turn their backs on Mafia life.

  Because he had easy access to Asaro, Valenti assured the agents he would be willing to wear a wire and make recordings to back up the things he would tell them. Valenti was busy with the tape recordings. From November 2008 through June 17, 2013, he recorded over 100 hours of his conversations with an additional 200 hours of telephone conversations. He began taping Asaro in earnest in October 2010. In his extensive debriefings, Valenti told the agents about the Paul Katz murder and he put Asaro right in the middle of it. Within days of Katz’s disappearance, Asaro asked Valenti to have one of the houses on 102nd Road available for a “meeting.” Then, Valenti told the agents, Asaro and the infamous Jimmy Burke arrived a few days later with the body of Katz. As Valenti told the FBI, Asaro related how he and Burke had strangled the unfortunate Katz with a dog chain, although a close examination of what Valenti would say in court raised a question about that scenario. Katz’s sin, according to Valenti, was that he was cooperating with the cops.

  Burke and Asaro dug the hole in the basement floor and dumped in Katz’s body, remembered Valenti. Burke never served a day in prison for Lufthansa and is believed to have carried out many murders, mostly in the aftermath of the Lufthansa robbery, that crippled the FBI’s ability to make a case. However, in April 1979, Burke was picked up for a federal parole violation and would essentially stay in prison for the rest of his life, following convictions for killing a fellow drug dealer and playing a role in fixing basketball games at Boston College during the late 1970s. Concerned that Katz’s body would be discovered in the basement of what was his daughter Catherine’s property, Burke wanted the remains moved. Valenti said Asaro asked him and his own son Jerome Asaro to dig up the bones and move them. Katz’s body had disintegrated by then, leaving behind bones, a skull, and bits of clothing in the pit, Valenti told the FBI. He and Jerome Asaro took out the remains the best they could and cemented over the hole.

  As the FBI dug up the basement on 102nd Road, what the agents discovered soon started to corroborate what Valenti had told them. In fact, he had done more talk. After meeting Asaro at the diner, Valenti went with the agents to the basement of the house on 102nd Road and among the board games, toys, and laundry bins pointed to the place where the grave was. Then the agents started to dig.

  At that point whatever they would find was the icing on the cake because investigators had already believed they had enough recordings to implicate Asaro in a host of other crimes. But having a murder to add to the indictment is always nice. The cement they broke through with the jackhammer had shown signs of being of a different age and constitution than the cement found in the other parts of the cellar floor. That was evidence that new cement had been laid down at some point after the original construction.

  Most important were the bones found in the cellar soil. Brad Adams could tell they were those of a man because even something as small as a hand bone could be measured and compared to statistics that could indicate with some certainty the sex of the deceased. The race of the victim or the age couldn’t be determined from such small samples in the grave. But, again, using the finger bones and the jaw, an approximate height of the person could be estimated: somewhere between five feet one inch to five feet ten inches.

  Paul Katz had been about five feet eight inches when he lived. But estimating the height of the deceased was not a way to determine with certainty the identity. Back at the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office, the bones and teeth collected by Adams were sent to the DNA lab for further work. Bones can be extremely useful for DNA analysis because they may contain genetic material that has survived the passage of time. Since the FBI already had information that the bones were those of Katz, the agents were able to track down two of his children, Lawrence and Ilsa, as well as the dead man’s sister Deborah and get DNA samples for comparison with the remains. For living people, the process was as simple as taking a swab from inside the cheek or collecting a few hairs.

  Tests on the bones found in the burial pit came up with a very close match with the samples taken from the Katz children. It was almost a perfect match. Frances Rue, from the medical examiner’s office, would later remark that she was 99.9 percent certain that the remains were those of Paul Katz. No, it was actually better than that. Rue was confident that the probability was more than a 99.9 percent certainty that the corpse which had rotted in the grave had been Katz. Gaspare Valenti had a good memory, at least about what he knew about the body in the basement floor. For the FBI that also meant that he was a reliable source of information.

  * * *

  Paul Katz had disappeared on December 9, 1969, at the age of twenty-eight after telling his wife Delores and their young children he was going, with some apprehension, to a meeting with a fellow hijacker named Joe Allegro. If he didn’t come back in fifteen minutes, his wife should call the police, said Katz. Wherever he went and whatever he did that day ended badly for Katz, and the DNA finding was clear evidence that Valenti had good information and was reliable—certainly about the demise of Katz and his burial. The condition of the bones also seemed to bear out what Valenti had said about the body being disinterred and taken away. Brad Adams and the FBI team found more hand bones farther down in the burial pit. To investigators this was a good indication that when the decomposed body was lifted out of the grave and taken away, the hands simply separated away from the arm bones and were left behind.

  So, Valenti was right about the burial and the fact that the mystery remains were those of Katz. But was his recollection about Asaro and his allegation about the cousin’s involvement in the Katz murder something that could be corroborated? If the agents were hoping that Asaro would say something clearly incriminating to his cousin on tape about Katz’s fate, they would be disappointed. But they were in no rush to build a case. Time and the racketeering laws were on their side.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A GOODFELLA’S LAMENT

  VINCENT ASARO HAD OVER HALF A CENTURY of a life of crime under his belt when he finally left Gaspare Valenti at the Esquire Diner that June 17 day as the FBI was digging for the bones of Paul Katz. It wasn’t the only life he knew. Asaro had his own fencing business in Howard Beach, so he had a source of legitimate income and by some accounts did a very good job of building fences. But as any gangster knows, life in the Mob is defined by what you do on the street with all of the other amigo nostri, the term Mafia members use to refer to each other.

  The goal of the Mafia was to make money, and Asaro knew that from the time he was a teenager. His father was Jerome Asaro, a somewhat handsome Italian man with a distinctive aquiline nose, a trait that he passed down to his son and a grandson also named Jerome. The family lived for a time at 1484 Sutter Avenue in the area of South Ozone Park. Around the corner, on Drew Street, was the home of Gaspare Valenti and his family. The houses were within a low-lying area of Brooklyn known as “The Hole,” so called because its sunken street level made it prone to flooding and the buildings were small and forgotten. It looked like a meteor hit it, was how mob associate Peter Zuccaro described the area.

  Today, although some development has made improvements, The Hole still has chicken coops, and tomato plants are known to grow by the side of the road. Drainage sewers are nonexistent in some places, and thick sheets of ice form in the streets during the coldest winters. The area gained its own brand of notoriety when in 2004 some FBI agents doing another dig in a vacant lot on Ruby Street un
earthed the remains of Dominick Trinchera and Philip Giaccone, two Bonanno crime family captains who were killed in a power struggle back in May 1981. It was another mob burial that Brad Adams was called in by the FBI to work on.

  We know Jerome Asaro settled on Sutter Avenue because an old article from the Long Island Star newspaper reported that as his home when he was arrested in December 1949, at a time when his son Vincent was about fourteen years old. It seems that Jerome was suspected by police to be working in a policy place in the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn that was printing what were said to be Italian lottery slips. Policy operations are illegal lotteries, historically popular in immigrant communities. According to police, the gang once a week received payoff numbers cabled from people in Italy and did $5 million a year in business. Jerome Asaro was thirty-seven years old at the time of his arrest with five other men and according to the newspaper was held on $1,000 bail. Detectives from the NYPD Confidential Squad seized printing plates and six cars, which the group allegedly used in its operation. Jerome Asaro was arrested in a car as he and three other men waited for runners to come and bring them receipts, said police.

  It is unclear what happened to Jerome Asaro in the Italian lottery case. But he didn’t stay under the radar very long. Three years later he was again arrested on charges he set fire twice in one day to his women’s clothing store at 14-23 101 st Avenue in Ozone Park. Officials told the Long Island Star that Asaro was believed to have set fire to the premises to collect on a $5,000 insurance policy, which was just about to lapse. The fires, which were on the ground floor of a forty-five-family apartment building didn’t do much damage, and Asaro denied any wrongdoing. His daughter was quoted in the newspapers as saying business had been bad in the eleven months the store was open and that she had not been paid in that time. The disposition of that case has been lost to history, but it did lead to photos of Jerome and his daughter being in the newspapers.